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Monday Mark-Down - For the Dollar!

The dollar is off 2% since Friday . That is sending oil back over $70 and gold back to $960 and has jacked the futures up 1% as the "value" of stocks tries to keep up with the less valuable dollars that they are exchanged for.  People often forget that stocks are a commodity too and are also exchanged for currencies - when the dollar falls, at least initially, stocks tend to rise.  Unfortunately so do our commodity costs but, as we saw in last week’s data, wages do not keep up and that, sadly, leads to a deflation of consumer buying power .  Every $10 increase in the price of a barrel off oil rips $25Bn a month out of the hands of global consumers, enough money to employ 6M people a year at $50,000 each.  Those jobs are torn away from other sectors as discretionary income goes to commodities and, by the time you add in refining mark-ups and the cascading effects on other raw material cost, the effect of a $10 per barrel rise in oil is doubled to what amounts to about 1M global jobs per dollar.  What we are seeing is the result of the inaction against GS and other commodity manipulators as they breezed through Congressional hearings, aided throught he process by a massive market rally that kept their nonsense off the front page.  Who cares if GS made a few extra bucks if the market is up 10% in a month?  We’ll see if the resurging energy and commodities sectors can provide the catalyst to move the S&P up over the 1,000 mark, a level we haven’t seen since the September crash, almost a year ago but also the last time the dollar index was below 78 so everything is coming full-circle, right back to the conditions that crashed us last time!  This is not to say we are going to fight the tide.  In the Summer of 2008 oil was around $120 a gallon and the Dow was around 11,500 from June through September before plunging 35% in the second leg of the crash.  If the market is determined to climb back up that cliff and try again, we need to at least head on the fact that they might make it all the way back to the top - especially with help from heavyweights like Alan Greenspan, who knocked the dollar down this weekend , saying there was no need for the US to raise…
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